In previous years, both Berkeley and San Leandro had rates much closer to the state's average. The agency's numbers are based completely on voluntary reporting from police agencies across the U.S. Therefore, the reports are widely believed to underreport the actual number of hate crimes.

The FBI released its 2016 hate crime statistics report Monday.

The report points to a wide range of hate crimes, motivated by bias toward race, ethnicity, ancestry, religion, sexual orientation, disability, gender, or gender identity. According to the state, most Vermont law enforcement agencies participate. There were also four reported "anti-religion" crimes in Miami Beach, two in North Miami, and one reported by Miami-Dade County Police. That's down from 43 in 2015 and 51 in 2014.

Most of the victims in the 2016 data, 58.9 percent, were targeted due to their race or ethnicity.

"There's a unsafe disconnect between the rising problem of hate crimes and the lack of credible data being reported", Greenblatt said. Among the religiously-motivated ones, 54 per cent of the crimes targeted members of the Jewish community, while about 25 per cent targeted Muslims.

Accounting for the number of incidents and national population demographics, that means black people are far more likely to be victims of hate crimes than white people.

The FBI and the justice department did not make that connection. But the city's small population, just 7,200 residents, means that just one extra hate crime per year can bump it's rate up by 13 points, making comparison with larger cities hard.

In addition to the above categories, the 2016 Federal Bureau of Investigation report also included statistics for anti-Arab (51) anti-Hispanic or Latino (344) and anti-other race/ethnicity/ancestry (223) crimes. The number of crimes against Jewish and Muslim citizens increased a year ago (just as Jewish and Muslim civil rights organizations warned would happen).